Microsoft says XP is definitely dead in June, Dell says it'll keep installing it
By Nilay Patel 
posted April 28th 2008 12:45PM
posted April 28th 2008 12:45PM
Steve Ballmer kicked up a little dirt last week when he said that Microsoft could "wake up smarter" and keep selling XP after the June 30 cutoff date if customer feedback demanded it, but as you'd expect, the company is busily trying to "clarify" that statement by saying that while it always listens to customers, XP is definitely going to die on the 30th. Well, apart from the ultraportable exception that'll last until 2012 or so. And the backlog of licenses still in reseller's hands. Oh, and a little company called Dell, which, as rumored, is going to take advantage of a Vista licensing loophole that allows it to sell a copy of Vista but preload XP instead. Yep, that's the plan -- Dell's going to report a Vista sale to Microsoft, but deliver an XP box with Vista upgrade DVD to customers. (That sound you just heard was a million accountants sighing in appreciation.) The program will be available for Latitude, OptiPlex, Precision, Vostro, and XPS systems (some with a minor fee), and Dell says it'll keep going as long as Microsoft supports the "downgrade" license option, which could be forever. Looks like June 30 just got a lot less scary for XP fans, no?Read - Microsoft clarification of Ballmer's comments
Read - Dell to keep selling XP
@ZeroCorpse : Wait a minute. I thought Mac users bragged that Macs run Vista the fastest, than any other computer?
Kill it .. Then they will have to move on SP2
I just think it is silly that you no longer have direct access to the hardware. This was something about Vista I could not clearly see the need for. And then they had the nerve to blame hardware manufacturers about the bulk of the crashes.
Hmm. Think I'll stick with XP and Ubuntu
I think the above capitalism comments sum up the reasoning for this. I do think that it's funny that Microsoft is now plagued by the driver issues that people associate with Linux. I wish this would cause manufacturers to wake up and realize that they could develop for more open platforms and see profits in that direction.
I'm definitely sticking with Linux. I had toyed with installing Vista on my machine as well, but I gave up on XP a couple years ago, Vista certainly isn't a reason to move back towards MS.
Don't take this the wrong way, but its actually one of the smartest decision microsoft has ever made. It adds system stability and increases your security. Now you may be wondering how? So let me give you a hint ... rootkits .
I just want an OS to work and leave me alone. It doesn't have to be pretty, constantly needing an internet connection and HOGGING all my resources(err Vista). Why should we have to buy new hardware every 2 or 3 years to "keep up"? More junk to go in the landfill I guess.
Everything "works" now on my Winblows machines and I'm going to leave them alone.
Vista uses alot more resources running to provide the fastest possible experience, so looking at a RAM meter and saying 'OOH VISTA SUCKS ITS KILLING ALL TEH RAM!' is just silly. Vista releases RAM as its needed for other programs.
besides ebay, where can i find old softwares??
stuffs like Photoshop CS1 in unopened box. why should i get CS2 when CS1 has all the features i would ever need!
WinXP FTW. The Microsoft OS that will never die. It'll just keep coming back stronger in SP updates. It's a lean, mean, fighting OS for a machine.
Vista isn't that bad. It's just that there's little incentive to move to it.
I don't give a damn about Vista and its suppose WOW!
Windows XP is here to stay, no matter if its pirated or not!
Although many claim that Vista is like ME, I find it to be more like 95, with Windows 7 being 98. It's a little rough around the edges, but it does the job pretty well. Windows 7 will be like what 98 is to 95, a refined version of 95, with more features and drivers and such.
Funny you should bring up with Win 3.1 to Win95 change over. There was a huge outcry about hardware not being up to snuff to run Win95. So much in fact that parody song Windows 95 sucks came out. Another interesting thing was it was the transition from 16bit to 32bit. Vista was the big change over to mainstream 64bit from 32bit as well. Granted 64bit was available for WinXP and Microsoft server OSs, but those are hardly mainstream.
I'm just not sure I see myself moving to Vista in the immediate future. Maybe eventually... but right now vista has nothing to offer me for the huge leap up in system requirements.
Dell's primary customer base is the business market... and businesses look at a cost-benefit balance. The cost of Vista is huge (license cost, training, downtime from bugs, new hardware, etc) and the benefit, from the point of view of many businesses, is non-existent. Why spend the cost when the average business doesn't get anything in return?
There isn't anything really wrong with vista... it's just new and suffers the same problems that any operating system deals with when it's new. I just wish Vista had more to bring to the table.
I love you Windows XD. : )
today: "We are still killing off XP. Pay no attention to that man."
tomorrow: "Here's your XP SP3!"
Just seems a bit odd, that's all.....
shenanigans.... and don't forget the clear and evident support on EEE's and OLPC's.. and low-end lappy's.
A notable note, Apple quits selling operating systems the day a new one comes out. 10.5 gets released, 10.4 gets pulled from shelves. Your only hope is to find a used copy or a 3rd party retailer to get the "outdated" OS. This is like that but, opposite.
I work at a library in a medium sized town, and we get Dell's business line of computers. For us we are very happy we can keep getting XP, becuase with 200 computers thru out the different locations, many of which are for public use, we would have to upgrade all 200 to Vista to keep everything uniform. There is no way we can afford to do that, or pay for the extra staff time to teach/explain the differences to the patrons with the current situation with the economy. Hopfully we will be able to use XP until the release of Windows 7, thus being able to skip an OS upgrade cycle and save $1000's.
I work at a library in a medium sized town, and we get Dell's business line of computers. For us we are very happy we can keep getting XP, becuase with 200 computers thru out the different locations, many of which are for public use, we would have to upgrade all 200 to Vista to keep everything uniform. There is no way we can afford to do that, or pay for the extra staff time to teach/explain the differences to the patrons with the current situation with the economy. Hopfully we will be able to use XP until the release of Windows 7, thus being able to skip an OS upgrade cycle and save $1000's.
Go Linux, go ! \o/
MSDOS. Why the hell can't you people just go back to your roots and run everything off of MSDOS without any problems. 98, ME, XP, Vista, Leopard, HOGWASH. DOS baby, that's where it's at. I love me some black screen with white text.
why dont you leave a good thing alone xp is easy to use vista takes to much ram to run not everybody has 512 or higher .
I don't like Vista, I don't want Vista. I'll keep my XP.
There are many benefits that Vista has for businesses, the least of which is more security and stability. What good is saving a bunch of money by keeping XP when everyone is always bitching about their computers crapping out. I dont know where this sudden love of XP comes from, I have seen more people hate XP than any other OS. The only complaints I hear from businesses about Vista is the learning curve as to where everything is and how it works now.
I have no issue with Dell doing this although it bugs me that Ballmer gets to make false claims about Vista sales as a result (which he is currently doing) - I can't imagine anyone's ego being so big they would purposely hurt their company's image and financial income to save face.
I agree that Vista w/SP1 is a total turd for performance but I have to admit I've tried Windows 2008 server on those same machines and the performance was GREAT. It copied files just as fast as XP - boot up and shutdown was quick. Apps opened MUCH MUCH faster. I could throw on the aero interface and sidebar gadgets and it is SNAPPY. I know WIndows 2008 shares a LOT of the same code as Vista SP1 but it is much much much faster than Vista. So in theory Vista could be fast - but for some reason MS crippled the performance of it.
I've tried all the recommended tweaks for Vista SP1 - turning off services and apps, disabling aero etc - but Windows 2008 is significantly faster. XP is a good OS and I use it as a benchmark. 2008 seems to compete quite nicely in many ways with XP even though Vista is signficantly slower. Just goes to show MS doesn't HAVE to release a crappy OS but for some reason with Vista they felt compelled to do so but didn't feel that need with 2008.
interesting.. although have you done a benchmark test to conclude the results?
I did the bencharks with Vista SP1 vs. XP and found some miserable results. I didn't bother with the benchmarks on 2008 - I can tell immediately the difference.
It takes a lot of tweaking to make it act like a desktop OS vs. a server OS but for the most part it is very similar to Vista as far as the interface goes. I'd recommend if you like playing around with OSs and have a spare hard drive - give it a try - you might be impressed but if you don't want to fiddle with things it is not going to be enjoyable for you.
I work with an MS MVP who was also impressed with the speed difference of 2008 on the same hardware that chugs with Vista SP1.
You can find plenty of benchmarks on the web of people finding the same thing. I can't say why there is such a difference with some very similar code but you are welcome to explore it since there is a trial version of 2008 for download.
My plan is to wait till SP2 for Vista, then buy it. By that time, all the new hardware I'll have to buy will be Vista-compatible and Microsoft will have ironed out the kinks.
Headaches are the price you pay when you upgrade to the latest and greatest before they work out all the bugs.
Death in June?
Wow what a terrible band...
i mean Just Awful.
oh yeah and xp? Whats the marketing plan behind that? You have a product people like better so instead to try to make your target market accept what is a bloated update?
Me thinks there is something deeper in this.
oh ya... that loophole with the Vista upgrade... Quite a smart idea, you get both a XP and Vista copy.
Realistically, what are "we" supposed to do?
Between XP that's getting killed off by MS desperately trying to push it's newest OS, and Vista that's generally a piece of bloated junkware that isn't ready to fully replace XP for the average user, could there be a better spot to be standing in?
If I didn't game on my PC, I'd ditch Windows in a heartbeat.
The OEM's should annouce that all XP machines that would be moved to Vista are now being moved to Ubuntu. See if that makes MS change their tune abit. :p
I DID switch from Windows to Mac. I had the beta version of Vista Ultimate on my old dual Xeon machine with 2GB ram and SCSI Ultra 320 Raid array!!
It ran fine, I liked it bar the pathetic beta drivers I had to use. It had some useful features and some crap features (I couldn't stand the left hand file list window in Window's Explorer)
So Why did I switch? I was starting to read lots of horror story's and I also wanted a laptop, and you couldn't beat the Mac Book Pro. But I also made the switch cause of the features Leopard has, what I was seeing were great useful things I'll use everyday as opposed to Vista which has the same old things. I haven't looked back really, If I was in the market now though then I would be really tempted by the Alienware m15x with Vista Ultimate 64bit installed.
So for me I switched cause of the benefits Leopard offers me. I remember installing XP onto P3 450 machines, I imagine Vista Ultimate is the same on a P4 the same? But a lot of you people seem to be running Vista on 32bit platforms? If you have a next gen OS then surely you should get next gen 64bit platforms to run it on?
I wish Microsoft would just include Virtual PC (which they give away for free) with base images of WinXP, Win2K, Win98, Win95 and DOS 6.22. Then people can run their crappy ten or fifteen or twenty year old software in a virtual machine, and we can move on to newer things.
This link compares vista and xp performance:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1332&page=5
There are growing pains obviously, and newer computers will run vista much better just as newer computers ran win95 and winXP better as others have said.
I run xp on my old computer since it runs much faster on the old hardware. I run vista on my new computer which has no problems running it.
Dragging your heels and saying you are sticking with XP has one problem unfortunately.....
-- MICROSOFT WILL STOP RELEASING PATCHES TO THE OS--
so eventually you are going to be wide open to all kinds of exploits. MS is a target of much antipathy and the unsupported OS will be very vulnerable. I can't justify running xp without security support in the future for any computer that has access to the internet.
My other option is to install ubuntu linux in dual boot with XP on my old computer and learn how to use it before xp support dies off completely. There are game companies that do support linux - like id software. Quake wars may not in popular opinion be as great as CoD4 but it does have linux support. id has supported linux for a long time. And for some of the other more popular games - I don't think valve/halflife supports linux, and blizzard doesn't. There is a subsciption application called cedega that costs about $5 a month that provides advances support for some popular windows games in linux however. There is also an app called WINE (free) but configuring it can be hair-pulling compared to the ease of cedega(at cost) from what I've read.
The other things people would really miss in linux are applications from Adobe, Macromedia, 3dsmax, and MicrosoftOffice - (though there are office clones available for linux). These are very hard to give up though for sure. However I would think the more people use linux alternatives and don't buy the windows-only applications the sooner those companies would be inclined to release linux support due to lost sales.
Ummm... Not dead but still alive like a tree! :)!
John, using up a whole lot of resources for a faster experience is good? Sounds like a backwards approach to me. An efficient OS would use a reasonable amount of resources and still be fast.
But maybe that's too much to ask these days, almost all main commercial software is getting resource hungry from what I've seen.
This whole Dell thing isn't original- if you look at a lot of the HP laptops hitting the distribution channel (Tech Data, Ingram Micro, etc) you see that they have the same option- specifically the 6710b models.
Vista flat out fails in all points of business. Loss of productivity, cost of ownership, learning curve, and failed code. I run my own computer business here in San Diego and I have not been able to sell Vista to any customers, they don't want it!!! I can't sell this crap to anyone. I tried to give it away and the customer looked at me like "are you crazy? I don't want that trash on my computer!" So wake up Microsoft, you should have added the "vista bloat" to XP Media Edition and gone on from there. XP is a hot seller here and still loading it on all my computers out the door. If I am forced to use Vista in the future, I will have to charge a premium price for fixing it, just like Bill does.